E-mail Retention Policy

INFORMATION SERVICES DEPARTMENT

Title: Email Retention

Number:PL410.0

Eff: 2/23/05Rev: 4/19/07

Purpose:All non-archived email greater than 12 months old will be purged from our email system each month. Archived email, which has been archived on a file server or on individual workstations, will NOT be deleted. This process will run monthly

Policy:All mail stored in any folder within the mail system (GroupWise) will be deleted, unless it has been archived. This includes the Mailbox, Sent Items, and any folder in the "Cabinet" that you have created and stored mail in. Email in the TRASH is removed after 1 week. ARCHIVED email will NOT be deleted. Most organizations, including Universities, have an email retention policy to discard old email. This is needed for good email housekeeping.

Maintenance must be run regularly to improve the efficient operation of the mail system. Removing old mail significantly reduces the likelihood of a mail system failure and reduces the time for recovery in case of a failure. Deleting old email is preferred to archiving everything. Statistics show that only about 5% of archived email is ever accessed. Please do not use archives as an alternative to trash.

Instructions on how to archive your email (faculty and staff only) are available athttps://www.cwu.edu/its-training/archiving-groupwise-pc ITS requires that all archiving bedone to local drives instead of file servers. Tips on how to convert your archives from the fileserver to your local drive will be available on this site soon.

Assistance in archiving is available at ext. 3694

Phone support for faculty and staff in setting up archiving is available at the HelpDesk at ext.2001